Mercy Philbrick's Choice eBook

“Jest look at your feet, Steve! they’re
wet through, an’ your coat too, a standin’
out in that drizzle. Anybody ’ud think you
hadn’t common sense,” he replied with
perfect good nature, and as heartily loving a tone
as if he had been feasting on her beauty, instead
of writhing inwardly at her ugliness,—­

“All right, Marty,—­all right.
I’m not so wet as I look. I’ll change
my coat, and come in to supper in one minute.
Don’t you fidget about me so, good Marty.”
Never was Stephen heard to speak discourteously or
even ungently to a human being. It would have
offended his taste. It was not a matter of principle
with him,—­not at all: he hardly ever
thought of things in that light. A rude or harsh
word, a loud, angry tone, jarred on his every sense
like a discord in music, or an inharmonious color;
so he never used them. But as he ran upstairs,
three steps at a time, after his kind, off-hand words
to Marty, he said to himself, “Good heavens!
I do believe Marty gets uglier every day. What
a picture Rembrandt would have made of her old face
peering out into the darkness there to-night!
She would have done for the witch of Endor, watching
to see if Samuel were coming up.” And as
he went down more slowly, revolving in his mind what
plausible excuse he could give to his mother for his
tardiness, he thought, “Well, I do hope she’ll
be at least tolerably good-looking.”

Already the younger of the two women who were coming
to live under his roof was “she,” in his
thoughts.

Chapter II.

In the mean time, the young widow, Mercy Philbrick,
and her old and almost childish mother, Mercy Carr,
were coming by slow and tiring stage journeys up the
dreary length of Cape Cod. For thirty years the
elder woman had never gone out of sight of the village
graveyard in which her husband and four children were
buried. To transplant her was like transplanting
an old weather-beaten tree, already dead at the top.
Yet the physicians had said that the only chance of
prolonging her life was to take her away from the
fierce winds of the sea. She herself, while she
loved them, shrank from them. They seemed to
pierce her lungs like arrows of ice-cold steel, at
once wounding and benumbing. Yet the habit and
love of the seashore life were so strong upon her
that she would never have been able to tear herself
away from her old home, had it not been for her daughter’s
determined will. Mercy Philbrick was a woman of
slight frame, gentle, laughing, brown eyes, a pale
skin, pale ash-brown hair, a small nose; a sweet and
changeful mouth, the upper lip too short, the lower
lip much too full; little hands, little feet, little
wrists. Not one indication of great physical
or great mental strength could you point out in Mercy
Philbrick; but she was rarely ill; and she had never
been known to give up a point, small or great, on
which her will had been fully set. Even the cheerfulness
of which her minister, Harley Allen, had written to
Stephen, was very largely a matter of will with Mercy.
She confronted grief as she would confront an antagonist
force of any sort: it was something to be battled
with, to be conquered. Fate should not worst her:
come what might, she would be the stronger of the
two. When the doctor said to her,—­